In the cleaning industry, cleaning compounds, such as soaps, detergents, and surfactants, are used for extracting contaminants from the surface of a textile. Generally, such cleaning compounds are effective because their chemical structures include both polar (hydrophilic) and non-polar (hydrophobic) components. Therefore, cleaning compounds can be dissolved with a polar solvent, such as water, and are capable of dissolving and extracting non-polar solutes, such as oil, grease, dirt, and other contaminants. Once the contaminants have been extracted from the textile, the solution, now holding the suspended contaminants, can then be lifted from the textile and expelled, thus leaving behind a clean surface.
In some applications, extracting contaminants from the textile is not the main goal. For example, when treating textiles that have an unpleasant smell (i.e. textiles that have been saturated with animal urine), some cleaning compounds target the malodorous contaminants to simply mask the bad smell. Other compounds do not mask the smell but instead alter the malodorous contaminants in such a way so as to decrease the foul odor that emanates from them.
However, conventional cleaning compounds are often stored as solids and require thorough mixing in order to dissolve the solid cleaning compounds into the cleaning solvent (e.g. water). This process of thoroughly mixing the solid cleaning chemical into a solvent can take a lot of time and may reduce the cleaning power of the chemical compound.
For example, a cleaning crew that drives a portable cleaning vehicle to a site may have to spend valuable time ensuring that the proper amount of solid chemicals are dissolved into a cleaning solvent and that the solid chemicals are sufficiently suspended in the solvent. Once dissolved, the cleaning crew must continually check to make sure that solid cleaning compounds do not precipitate out of solution, which would decrease the cleaning/oxidizing power of the cleaning system and potentially waste valuable chemicals. Additionally, any solid cleaning compounds that are not completely dissolved into the solvent may remain on the textile after the cleaning process and thus toxic and/or harmful chemicals may be left at the cleaning site.